Peer review

Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of money for research. Publishers and agencies use peer review to select and to screen submissions. At the same time, the process assists authors in meeting the standards of their discipline. Publications and awards that have not undergone peer review are liable to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals in many fields.

At a journal or book publisher, the task of picking reviewers typically falls to an editor. When a manuscript arrives, an editor solicits reviews from scholars or other experts who may or may not have already expressed a willingness to referee for that journal or book division. Granting agencies typically recruit a panel or committee of reviewers in advance of the arrival of applications.

As a policy, editors often invite a manuscript's authors to name people who they consider qualified to referee their work. Authors are also invited to name natural candidates who should be disqualified; with regard to which the authors are asked to provide justification (typically expressed in terms of conflict of interest).

Editors solicit author input in selecting referees, because adademic writing typically is very specialized. Editors often oversee many specialties, and may not be experts in any of them, since editors may be fulltime professionals with no time for scholarship. But after an editor selects referees from the pool of candidates, he or she typically is obliged not to disclose their identity to the authors.

Scientific journals observe this convention universally. To the editor, the two or three chosen referees report their evaluation of the article and suggestions for improvement. The editor then transmits these comments to the author, meanwhile basing on them his or her decision whether to publish the manuscript. When an editor receives both very positive and very negative reviews for the same manuscript, as sometimes happens, he or she often will solicit one or more additional review as a tie-breaker.

As another strategy in the case of ties, editors may invite authors to reply to a referee's criticisms and permit a compelling rebuttal to break the tie. If an editor does not feel confident to weigh the persuasiveness of a rebuttal, he or she may solicit a response from the referee who made the original criticism. In rare instances, an editor will convey communications back and forth between authors and a referee, in effect allowing them to debate a point.

During this process, the role of the referees is advisory, and the editor under no formal obligation to accept the opinions of the referees.

After reviewing and resoving any potential ties, there may be one of three possible outcomes for the article. The two simplest which are uncommon for most journals are outright rejection and unconditional acceptance. In most cases, the authors may be given a chance to revise, with or without specific recommendations or requirements from the reviewers.

Screening by peers may be more or less laissez-faire, and in this as well as other regards it is prone to differ between disciplines. Physicists, for example, are liable to opine that decisions about the worthiness of an article are best left to the marketplace. Yet even within such a culture peer review serves to ensure high standards in what is published. Outright errors are detected and authors receive both edits and suggestions.

Patrick Michaels claims that in regards to global warming, an egregious case of statistical manipulation managed to pass one of the world's most influential journals. He claims the article authors calculated a false trend line, by selecting a subset of data especially chosen to support their hypothesis; he further argues that if they had used all available data the calculations would not have supported their hypothesis and implies that the journal editors were well aware of this and thus in on the deception:

In 1996, conveniently a day before the U.N. conference that gave birth to the Kyoto Protocol, Nature published a paper purporting to match observed temperature with computer models of disastrous warming. It used weather balloon data from 1963 through 1987. The actual record, however, extended (then) from 1958 through 1995, and, when all the data were used, the troubling numbers disappeared. Since that famous incident, people have been very leery of what major scientific journals publish on global warming.[1]

However, others have pointed out that there are a very large number of scientific journals that one can be published in, making control of information difficult. In addition, most peer review is now done after the scientific results have been circulated via preprints.

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